ARTICLES ABOUT SCOTT WALKER BY DATE - PAGE 5

SPRINGFIELD — Illinois lawmakers returned from spring break Tuesday to tackle the serious issues of an unresolved state budget and the rising costs of pensions and health care for the poor, but there were plenty of sideshows to distract them. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican facing a recall vote, criticized Illinois' state of affairs at a business forum only blocks from the Capitol as organized labor staged a rally telling him to go back home. Democratic Rep. Derrick Smith caused a stir of his own as he returned to the Illinois House for the first time since he got slapped with a bribery charge.

- Opponents of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Tuesday will submit a mountain of petition signatures demanding his recall, and in anticipation, the embattled Republican has flooded airwaves with ads highlighting his stewardship in creating "thousands of new jobs. " It is a claim at once correct and misleading, federal jobs data suggest, underscoring how the drive to dislodge Walker is shaping up as a fact-challenged slugfest and a pre-presidential election proxy for competing economic visions in a sharply divided land.

MADISON, Wis. — The bitter partisan trench war that has transformed Wisconsin into a proxy for polarization nationwide opened a new front Tuesday with the formal launch of a petition drive to force a recall vote on freshman Republican Gov. Scott Walker. The move was long expected but given fresh impetus by the success of a recent union-friendly referendum in Ohio. It also raises the possibility that voters in this crucial swing state will be casting a test vote on the nation's political mood just months before next year's presidential balloting.

Your editorial " ...and pols on the lam " (Feb. 25) is totally outrageous. You totally downplay that Gov. Scott Walker is not operating in good faith (please listen to his famous phone call). He is a union-buster and just like the Republicans in the U.S. Senate have filibustered a zillion times in the last two years, the 14 Democrats are exercising their right not to give the dictatorial Republicans the opportunity to vote. This is a perfectly legal tactic and you should be ashamed for condemning it instead of the power grab that is taking place in Wisconsin.

The list Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is soliciting ideas via his Twitter account (@ScottKWalker) for what he should wager with Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn on this Sunday's big Bears-Packers NFC title game. We have a few suggestions, just to get beyond the predictable beer, cheese and encased meats: •Budget deficits •State income tax rates •Jobs •Rhetoric •High-speed rail funding •Speeding-ticket exemptions •The Brewers Brains and beauty?

Scott Walker Tilt (Drag City) (star) (star) (star) Since his days in the Walker Brothers, a Phil Spector-style British Invasion group of the '60s, Scott Engel (a k a Walker) has been making increasingly personal, grandly ambitious solo records. On "Tilt," his neo-operatic voice is put in service of creepy -- albeit lushly orchestrated -- art songs that do not cater to verse-chorus pop formula. The intense beauty of the arrangements belies the menace lurking beneath Walker's virtuoso vocal performance.